ad been bitterly demonstrated that the
thorns of the trackless wilderness had no sort of reverence for the
texture of the king's red coat.

Even the cat realized the transition to the demesne of civilization and
in some sort the wonted domestic atmosphere. She suddenly gave an
able-bodied wriggle in the basket on Josephine's back where she had
journeyed, pappoose-wise, sprang alertly out, and scampered, tail up and
waving aloft, across the parade. Josephine's shriek of despair rang
shrilly on the air, and Captain Demere himself made a lunge at the
animal, as she sped swiftly past, with a seductive cry of "Puss! puss!"
A young soldier hard by faced about alertly and gave nimble chase; the
cry of "Puss! puss!" going up on all sides brought out half a dozen
supple young runners from every direction, but Kitty, having lost none
of the elasticity of her muscles during her late inaction, darted
hither and thither amongst her military pursuers, eluded them all, and
scampering up the rampart, thence scaled the stockade and there began to
walk coolly along the pointed eminence of this lofty structure as if it
were a backyard fence, while the soldier boys cheered her from below. In
this jovial demonstration poor Josephine's wailing whimper of despair
and desertion was overborne, and with that juvenile disposition to force
the recognition and a share of her woe on her elders she forthwith lost
the use of her feet, and was half dragged, rather than led, by poor
Odalie, who surely was not calculated to support any added burden. She
herself, with halting step, followed Captain Demere across the parade to
a salient angle of the enclosure, wherein stood one of the block-houses,
very secure of aspect, the formidable, beetling upper story jutting out
above the open door, from which flowed into the dusky parade a great
gush of golden light. Josephine's whimper was suddenly strangled in her
throat and the tears stood still on her cheeks, for as Captain Demere
stepped aside at the door with a recollection of polite society,
yielding precedence to the ladies, which formality Odalie marveled to
find surviving in these rude times so far on the frontier, Josephine
seemed resolved into a stare of dumb amazement, for she had never seen a
room half so fine. Be it remembered she was born in the backwoods and
had no faint recollection of such refinement and elegances as the
colonial civilization had attained on the Carolina coast, and which her
fath